Alice
by KuryakinGirl
Summary: Juliet wonders how her journey down the rabbit hole will end.  Post-ep for In Plain Fright. UPDATED: Through the Looking Glass: Now even the familiar seemed peculiar to Carlton. Companion piece to Alice, post-ep for Yin 3 in 2D as Chapter 2.
1. Alice

Disclaimer—Characters belong to Steve Franks. No copyright infringement intended. Any similarity to events or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Author's Notes—For my birthday, I got a coffee mug with an Alice in Wonderland quote that has become the motto of my life_. It would be so nice if something would make sense for a change_. Truer words were never printed on a mug.

Also, I reallllly should be working on NaNoWriMo instead of this, but... ah, well. Unbeta'ed.

Alice—Juliet wonders how her journey down the rabbit hole will end. Post-ep for In Plain Fright.

* * *

Down the rabbit hole.

Carlton's words kept coming back to her all weekend. Had she fallen into Wonderland? Was it all some kind of dream? Some kind of idealized life that wasn't reality at all?

Shawn had always been persistent in his pursuit. From the very start, from the very moment they had met, he'd employed the classic _elementary school_ way of annoying someone, pestering someone to show interest. She hadn't been sure what to think then, especially after Carlton's harsh words of warning to her about the psychic all those years ago.

But the continued flirting had worn down her defenses over time. He had become more and more creative in his attempts. But, it seemed like every time they got close, something got in the way. When she was serious about giving "them" a shot, he had a girlfriend. When he realized he'd made a mistake and wanted to try with her, she had a boyfriend. It was a never-ending, vicious cycle until now.

But now was different in good _and_ bad ways. She wasn't sure why she felt waves of nausea. She wasn't sure why she wondered if she'd done the right thing even when she was so happy that she and Shawn were finally together.

The whole internal struggle kept her awake most of the weekend. By Monday, she was nearly dead.

But everything became crystal clear when a coffee cup appeared on her desk from a fast moving blur caused by a tall, gangly man.

Carlton.

She'd essentially promised him last week that they were still good. That their partnership was strong, that she wouldn't back Shawn more than him. But, would her heart let her? Could her head prevail when she knew that Shawn was wrong? Could she still remember that their romance was second to the safety and security of Santa Barbara while on duty? More importantly, would Shawn let her?

One thing she'd learned-that Carlton had helped to teach her-was that the truth eventually came out. Someone would break. The logic would track. The house of cards would fall down. That was life. That was reality.

Carlton never looked back at her as he crossed to his desk and sat with his own cup of coffee. He had known her well enough to tell the exhaustion under the makeup, the fatigue beneath the smile. He had known her well enough to know when something was wrong.

More than that, he had trusted her enough to come to him when she was ready. With her, he wasn't pushy. He'd let it, whatever _it_ was, develop in its own time unless he felt that it was potentially dangerous or damaging to them, particularly to her.

With that knowledge, the guilt she felt was overwhelming. She couldn't trust him, though, could she? It was against the rules, her relationship with Shawn, and Carlton was as by-the-book as they came.

It was just astonishing to her how _right _he'd gotten the situation. She did feel like Alice, trying to find her way home, with peculiar cakes and potions,with mad hatters and caterpillars.

The state of confusion she found herself in was frightening. Even the coffee almost seemed to mock her.

_Drink me_.

She would've loved to tell him. To come clean, to confess. But she and Shawn had made a deal, a pact. Her relationship with Shawn was affecting her work already, clearly. Even Carlton knew she was different, in need of some kind of care.

The worst part was knowing now that someone would get hurt in the end. Either Shawn or Carlton. One or the other would be potentially devastated. The fallout would be so much more disastrous the longer the lies and subterfuge and hiding continued.

And if she was already in such agony over it, would she even be able to survive the rest of the trip through Wonderland?

* * *

End.


	2. Through the Looking Glass

Disclaimer—Characters belong to Steve Franks. No copyright infringement intended. Any similarity to events or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Author's Notes—This isn't beta'ed. I really ought to find a Psych beta... All my usual betas for other fandoms aren't Psych-o's.

Through the Looking Glass—Now even the familiar seemed peculiar to Carlton. A follow-up to Alice. Post-ep for Yin 3 in 2D.

* * *

He was certain that he hadn't seen what he just saw. That it was a figment of his overactive imagination. But, Buzz had told him he was a robot.

One thing he knew about robots was that they didn't have imaginations.

Flights of fancy had no place in his world. And seeing Juliet with Shawn, well...that... that simply wasn't true. It couldn't be. Sure, Shawn was annoying and awful. Shawn was, on a good day, grating, but Juliet was strong enough to withstand the psychic's advances, that she wouldn't succumb to his slick talk.

His partner was better than that.

Except, as he walked away from the two-way glass, as he numbly put one foot in front of the other, he wondered if he'd been wrong.

As he made his way back to the main office floor, he took solace in the normalcy of the place. The sounds of phones ringing off the hook, of uniform shoes on the tile, of fingers dancing across keyboards. The smells of scalding coffee, of something microwavable that some desk sergeant had brought for lunch, of _justice_. The police station, the headquarters for Santa Barbara's best and brightest, had always been a place of comfort, of solace for him.

Now even the familiar seemed peculiar. The once beloved place seemed so foreign to him.

As he dropped his ceramic coffee cup into the trash, still beyond distracted, still on autopilot, he continued on to his desk. He just needed to get a grip, to find his reality and focus on it.

His reality was a partner who trusted him, one who, while not always agreeing with him, backed him up, one hundred percent without fail. And Shawn Spencer, while occasionally seeming to be on top of everything, couldn't possibly have some kind of supernatural gift. It was just parlor trick _hooey_.

And his partner was just too smart to fall for that.

But, she was more than that to him, than just a coworker. She was a friend, and he didn't have many of those. In fact, she was the only one, really. But, friends didn't keep secrets like _that _from each other. Friends were honest and they would seek assistance from each other.

And maybe that was why he felt so lost, deep within the scary and confusing wilds of Wonderland. He had no one to go to, no one to process with.

His partner and his best friend had kept something from him. Something that was of monumental importance to her. He knew how much value she put into interpersonal relationships.

And Shawn... If he was honest, if he got down to the heart of the matter, it wasn't actually the psychic part of the equation that was bothering him. He was just _there_, on the periphery of the big picture.

It was because she didn't trust him. Because, clearly, she didn't feel the same way about him as he felt about her.

He dropped into his chair, trying to determine what had happened, or how it happened, or, most importantly, what it was that was now wrong with _him_. As his heart pounded in his chest, faster and faster, as his blood pressure made its skyrocketing ascent, it felt familiar. The realization hit him like a freight train.

He felt the same way he had when Victoria left him.

Betrayal, heartache, and despair all wrapped up into one awful, miserable emotion. It seemed to live in his chest, multiplying in intensity and becoming heavier by the second, much like the growing tension in his shoulders.

But, he didn't love Juliet, not the way he had loved his wife. She was more like Lauren to him, like his little sister. But, Juliet was closer to him than even Lauren was. He rarely saw his sister. Occasionally there were emails or phone calls, but she usually had plans on holidays that didn't include her big brother. It wasn't that he blamed her.

Juliet, on the other hand, he talked to daily. Juliet, he spent the majority of his time with.

More than all of that, he realized that whatever it was between Juliet and Shawn made him a pretty poor head detective. It had to have been going on for a while between them. Right under his nose.

His whole world was shaken, rocked to the core. Up was down, left was right, and his day, which had been pretty bright until just moments ago, now seemed dark as night.

He'd warned her about falling through the rabbit hole. When he'd told her that, he never imagined he would've tumbled right down after her.

* * *

End.


End file.
